Updated NYPD Anti-Crime System To Ask: ‘How We Doing?’ (NYT)

May 9, 2017

It was a policing invention with a futuristic sounding name — CompStat — when the New York Police Department introduced it as a management system for fighting crime in an era of much higher violence in the 1990s. Police departments around the country, and the world, adapted its system of mapping muggings, robberies and other crimes; measuring police activity; and holding local commanders accountable.

Now, a quarter-century later, it is getting a broad reimagining and being brought into the mobile age. Moving away from simple stats and figures, CompStat is getting touchy-feely. It’s going to ask New Yorkers — via thousands of questions on their phones — “How are you feeling?” and “How are we, the police, doing?”

…The department’s plan is for the commanders to get the data each month so they can tweak block-by-block deployments or tailor their strategies to better answer the concerns of residents. (It might also factor into how commanders are evaluated.)

“Before this, it was anecdotal,”said Commissioner O’Neill, an avatar of CompStat for decades, explaining the system on a recent day in a conference room at 1 Police Plaza, surrounded by images of the multicolored city maps his commanders are getting.

“Now, we’ll actually have real-time information, real-time feedback about how we’re doing from the people in the community,” he said. “I think that, in the long run, it’s going to help us build a safer city.”